


leaping the dragon gate

by ultranos



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Gen, bit of swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-21 18:04:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8255260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultranos/pseuds/ultranos
Summary: "Don't go where I can't follow."
Because Alex Danvers is just a human.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to @volondo-voy for the beta. Any errors are my own.

The girl is… small. That’s the first thing Alex thinks as she watches her parents out the window, looking on as they greet their new houseguest. (And then she immediately winces, as if her mom can read her mind and she can feel the Disapproving Look all the way up here somehow. _Foster sibling_. Clinical, but good enough.) And the girl is small, and she’s not sure if it’s because of the man who towers over her or because of the way the girl’s shoulders curl in on themselves, like she’s a turtle afraid to poke her head too far out of her shell.

Alex can’t help her frown, can’t help but glare a little at the man her dad is (probably) smiling at. Superman, the Man of Steel, a superhero… and he can’t even make time for his cousin, so the kid gets dumped on them. She wishes she could shoot lasers from her eyeballs — just because he can’t deal with the squirt means Alex has to get _her_ life turned upside-down? How is that fair?

But Alex Danvers isn’t an alien, doesn’t have superpowers. Alex is just a human, so all she can do is scowl out the window.

The girl looks up, right at the window she’s standing in, as if she can see through the curtains Alex is peeking through.

Alex flinches, and turns away.

—-

Mom’s brilliant idea on how to introduce their newest houseguest to life on Earth is to inflict all of Alex’s childhood movies on her. Like, all eleventy billion of them. And it was _heavily implied_ that Alex should be in charge of this activity. Meaning that now she’s stuck weighing the cultural merits of _The Rescuers Down Under_ versus _Space Jam_ , because she obviously has nothing better to do with her life.

Kara is hovering, shifting from foot to foot like she had a million questions that she’s too scared to ask, and it is driving Alex _crazy_. So she gives Kara explicit instructions on how to use the popcorn maker, because there is no way they are going to get through this without buttery, salty goodness, and sends her off to go deal with that while Alex wrestles with the entertainment system. (Because Dad decided to “optimize” the wiring. _Again._ )

There’s a yelp from the kitchen. _Oh god, what did Kara break this time?_ Alex runs around the corner and slides into the kitchen in her socks. And then stares. Nothing is actually broken. In fact, the kitchen looks… surprisingly normal, if one ignores the alien cowering under the kitchen table.

Alex sighs. _How_ is this her life?

She tromps over and pokes her head under the table. “Yo?”

Kara whimpers. She actually whimpers, eyes squeezed shut. Alex blinks and shuffles her feet, feeling awkward. “Er, Kara? You okay?” She immediately winces. _Well, no, you dumbass, of course she’s not okay, does she look okay?_

Kara flinches and hunkers down even more, tucking her arms around her head. “What _is_ that?” she hisses. 

Alex raises an eyebrow. “What’s what?” There’s nothing weird going on.

Kara flinches again, making the table shake. “Explosions! _Why is it exploding?_ ”

Alex frowns. _Wait, is this the first time Kara has heard..._ “You mean the _popcorn_?”

Kara just curls up tighter. Alex very nobly resists the urge to kick a chair.

The popcorn maker doesn’t appear to be in danger of overflowing the bowl, so that’s one crisis she doesn’t have to deal with, which just leaves the miserable little ball of alien underneath the kitchen table. Alex bites back a swear, because Mom and Dad are still at the labs and it’s just her at home. The kid’s freaking out over a damn popcorn maker, and how in the world do you deal with this kind of culture shock?

There’s a bitter taste in the back of her mouth, a sour coiling in her gut as she realizes she viciously _hates_ Kara’s cousin. The cousin who grew up on Earth, who can explain all this stuff to the traumatized kid who’s cowering under the kitchen table over a stupid _popcorn maker_. The cousin who just left her here, in Alex’s hands (and Alex’s hands are too small to hold together a lost planet).

Alex is just a girl.

She drops her head and sighs. “Move over,” she grumbles as she grabs a few kernels, plops gracelessly on the floor, and scoots under the table.

Kara lifts her head and stares at her. “What?”

“Move over. It’s cramped under here.” Alex says, handing over the popcorn to show it’s safe, then looking away and studying the whorls in the wood above her head. “We’ve _got_ to get you out more if you think food is this exciting.”

She can feel Kara’s gaze on her, but she’s close enough that she can also feel the tension start to leave the kid. She hesitates a moment, but then slowly moves her arm.

The fingers that entwine with her own are warm.

—-

The bannister railing digs into spine, but Alex can’t bring herself to care. She’s sitting at the top of the steps, half in shadow, digging the heels of her palms into her eyes.

She can’t cry.

She didn’t in the school office, when the AP dragged her out of class and told her that her dad was dead. Not under the weight of the teachers’ pitying looks, or her friends’ and classmates’ confused ones. But now she’s home, where those looks can’t find her, and instead of feeling safe she just feels… empty. 

She can’t cry now.

Not when she catches the sound of her mom’s sobs coming from upstairs, muffled by the closed wooden door of her parents’ bedroom. Her mom shouldn’t even be home. Everything’s all wrong, and Alex doesn’t know how to interrupt that grief, let alone how to share it. She thought she’d have a second to herself, cry it all out before anyone else was home. The high school gets out before the middle school, so it’s not like last year, when both she and Kara would get home at the same time. Sometimes arguing.

Alex winces. More often than not, it would have been Alex complaining about whatever weird culture shock Kara had experienced that day. Thinking back on that, she feels her ears burn in shame. No wonder Dad expected better.

But Dad is gone, and now it’s just the three of them. She feels a weight settling on her shoulders, pushing her down, growing heavier with the sound of her mother’s grief and the memory of Kara’s lost looks.

Alex is just a kid.

Just before Kara comes home, she hears her mom manage to pull herself out of the bedroom. When she comes into the kitchen, Alex tries to smile from where she’s standing by the stove.

“Don’t worry, Mom. I’ve got dinner.”

—-

The phone rings and Alex wants to scream. She just crawled into bed five minutes ago. She’s been awake for 36 hours straight, and her vision’s going all abstract-watercolor at the edges. _And_ she has a class in four hours. She doesn’t have time for phone calls.

She also doesn’t have the energy to throw her phone at the wall, so she squints at the caller ID instead, then wants to bury her head in the pillow.

It’s Kara.

Alex thinks about letting it go to voicemail, but it’s Kara. But if she answers it, she’s not going to be able to sleep. But if she doesn’t answer it, she’ll feel guilty enough that she still won’t be able to sleep. Goddammit.

She answers the phone. “Hey.”

“Alex, I need your help.” _Oh boy._ “I don’t know how to do this, how do you handle being around so many people at college because I’m pretty sure my roommate thinks I’m weird and I don’t know if I can focus in all these classes when there’s so many distractions like if I sit too close the professor’s mic hurts my ears but if I’m in the back no one wants to talk to me and where do people even go to make friends oh god what if I never figure this out?” Kara spits out in one anxious, super-too-long breath.

Alex closes her eyes and does not groan. She has class in _four hours_. She has three problem sets she needs to put the finishing touches on before turning them in tomorrow, and there’s also that frat party her roommate Allison has been trying to drag her to since she skipped the last… ten due to homework. (Allison is also correct when she says Alex has no damn social life and will probably die from overwork, not that Alex will give her the satisfaction of _admitting_ that.) If she doesn’t get a nap right now, she’s going to have to skip the party again, and Allison has been dropping hints that the girl from the library who works at SLAC might also be there, and dammit, she’s been wanting to ask her questions for weeks.

And with her schedule, she doesn’t know the next time she’s even going to get this chance, and why is everything so goddamn hard?

Alex is just tired.

But… it’s Kara.

“Okay, can we try this again, but this time maybe with more of the breathing thing?”

—-

Her vision’s still spinning a little as she cradles her head in her hands, the cold of the steel seat seeping into her legs. She’s in the goddamn drunk tank, and isn’t that just a perfect comment on her goddamn life?

( _“Alex, I’m sorry, but we don’t have the funding for you.”_

_“But… but Professor Hannigan said that the postdoc position...”_ )

She knows she’s lucky it’s not worse, that she could have actually gotten into her car, tried to drive. God, what the hell was she thinking? She could have completely ruined her life. 

Oh right. She doesn’t have one of those anymore.

( _“That… Saul hired someone else.”_

_“He said I’d have it, I wrote that grant!”_

_“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”_ )

The alcohol tastes sour in the back of her throat, trying to claw its way back up. Or maybe it’s the knowledge that everything Alex has worked for, everything she threw herself into for the last couple of years, working herself to the bone… it didn’t mean anything in the end.

Dad had been a professor. Alex had thought that, well, maybe she could do the same. He might not be here to see it, but she could make him proud, follow in his footsteps. The way he’d explain things, the way he’d go on for hours if you let him on whatever he was researching or what one of his grad students did, Alex loved that. Wanted to keep a part of him alive like that.

( _“Why didn’t he tell me? I… there’s no faculty or postdoctoral positions open, not this late.”_

_“...I might be able to scrape a week or something for you, but that’s it. I’m so sorry.”_ )

Should have known she’d screw that up too, somehow.

Alex is just a failure.

She doesn’t know how she’s going to pick herself up this time. She doesn’t even know if she wants to.

—-

Alex hits the mat with a whoomph, air forcing itself from her lungs. She tries to roll before the booted foot nails her in the ribs and only barely manages it. The mad scramble to her feet is not graceful, but she’s up just in time to block a wicked jab to her left.

Her lungs are burning, feeling like she can’t pull air in fast enough. Her right shoulder’s aching (fell badly earlier) and she’s pretty sure her chest is just one massive bruise. 

“You’re getting sloppy,” her opponent states.

She squints at him, trying to shake sweaty hair out of her eyes. He just stares at her with a stony expression, like he has much better things to do than waste time with her. Bastard doesn’t even look like he’s breathing hard.

And that’s when he launches into an offensive sequence Alex can barely handle. In fact, she doesn’t, and his vicious roundhouse kick nails her right in the ribs, sending her crashing to the ground.

Her trainer sighs. “You’re done, Danvers.”

The two have been in this training room for eleven hours.

Everything hurts. Part of Alex wants to roll over and die, just give this up. She’s a scientist. Why the hell is she willingly here getting her ass kicked on a daily basis? She’s not a soldier. But the DEO is offering her a chance, a chance to do something meaningful with her life when she was out of options. A chance she can’t let slip through her fingers.

But she’s not going to be able to keep hostile aliens away or pesky feds away from Kara if she can’t even beat her combat trainer.

Alex is just a rookie.

She staggers to her feet and wipes the blood from her mouth.

“Again.”

—-

Alex grips her rifle like it’s a lifeline. It’s the quiet in the field that’s the worst, she decides. Those moments when you don’t know if you’re going to live to see the next one, the long silences that creep into your brain, slither into your lungs, and wrap you up in fear. She licks her lips, mouth dry, and tries to breathe as quiet as she can.

Bates is leading this mission, and Alex wonders if she’ll ever get used to field work and be able to make the decisions of who lives and dies like he can. He holds up his hand.

_wait_.

It’s a pair of fugitives they’re hunting; two brothers, the briefing said. Nasty pieces of work, but the DEO mandate is to try to bring them in alive. From the stories she hears, that’s sometimes harder than any of them want it to be.

_clear. go forward, cover._

Bates’ hands flash through the signs, and she and her other two teammates are moving forward. They’ve just made it to the alcove down the hall when they hear the scream behind them. Alex spins around and one of the hostiles is there. And Bates has a spike through him, blood dripping down from his stomach onto the ground, and he’s screaming and choking...

And the hostile grabs his head and twists and Bates isn’t screaming anymore.

Alex has her rifle in the ready position and finger on the trigger before she even realizes it. Bates is sliding off the spike, and the hostile is _grinning_ , all vicious teeth in a jaw that looks almost too small and she knows without even looking that her two (remaining) teammates are frozen and there’s not enough time to call for backup, oh god oh god, her commander is _dead_ and the alien is still alive and...

Alex is just an agent.

She squeezes the trigger, aims right between the eyes. The hostile is just as dead before Bates even hits the ground.

Her commander is dead, she’s in charge now, and there’s still another alien out there. No one else is dying today, not on this mission.

(Later, she’ll stare at her hands and drink more than she has since Then, because she ended a life today. She’ll drink to stop her hands from shaking, because there is someone who lost his brother to her bullet today, and there’s a steady drumbeat of what-if in her head.

But she’d do it again, and again, and again — without question — to protect those that are _hers_ , and Alex wonders if this makes her a monster.)

—-

They shot her down. They shot _Kara_ down. The words echo in Alex’s brain, and for the first time in a very long time, she’s scrambling. She’s untethered, lost in a sea of “what the hell” because her employers just _shot her little sister out of the sky_.

Stop. Breathe.

Kara’s unconscious, because even she can’t take falling several thousand feet (like a shooting star and argh _stop thinking like that_ ) without damage. Alex hopes, prays to a god she doesn’t know if she believes in anymore, that she knows enough about how Kryptonians work that the glorified tanning bed she rigged up is good enough to fix her sister.

Alex doesn’t know what she’ll do if Kara isn’t okay.

Her sister is so _still_ , and that’s what echoes in her brain, ricocheting off neurons and pushing her ever further toward the edge of completely flipping out. Because Kara is never meant to be still. Kara is laughter and sunshine incarnate, bound up in eternal control. She isn’t meant to be contained, to be lying there unmoving. (Lying there like the dead)

Henshaw orders Kara bound down, and the click of those shackles cracks something inside her. But Alex swallows the fear down, pushes it away to later, always dealing with it later, because Kara is here and Alex needs to fix this.

She absolutely doesn’t think about what’s going to come after Kara wakes up, when she sees Alex standing there stripped of her own secrets, in the uniform of the very people who shot her out of the sky. She doesn’t think about the words she heard from her mom and dad all those years ago, hidden at the top of the stairs, about how they had to keep Kara away from places like this. She doesn’t think about whether “keeping Kara safe” for the last two years has been a truth or a lie, or if she’s just fucked up beyond recognition.

Alex is just scared.

So she doesn’t think about any of that, and keeps working.

—-

“Deep down, you hate me. And that’s why you killed my aunt.” 

Part of Alex’s brain is screaming that this isn’t Kara, that this can’t be Kara. But it is, in fact, her little sister accusing her of destroying her family. And Alex finds herself unable to say a word. Even though it isn’t true, because she’d rather cut off her own arm than hurt Kara.

That doesn’t change the fact that the blade slid so easily between Astra’s ribs. Easily. Bloodlessly.

She fucked it up this time, because she might as well have stabbed her sister. There’s no such thing as a bloodless kill. Because when Alex stares at her hands, she feels the blood that didn’t coat them. Her hands are stained and she’s reminded that she is not an innocent every time she sees Kara mourn her aunt that she didn’t get to save.

And that’s why Kara’s words slide into her like knives, and why Alex can’t do anything other than just _take it_. Because Alex stopped running from the truth a long time ago, and Kara might be under the influence, but it doesn’t mean she’s wrong.

She can’t stop Kara from leaving. She doesn’t even think she wants to.

Alex is just hurting.

And she doesn’t know if she can fix it this time. 

—-

“Come on, you stupid thing, don’t you dare break now,” Alex mutters between gritted teeth. She’s got a death grip on the control stick of Kara’s pod, and if the situation wasn’t so goddamn dire, she’d probably be absolutely giddy with the fact that _holy shit, she’s in space_. 

But Kara is apparently trying to commit suicide by heroics, like an idiot. Kara might have made her peace with it, but Alex sure as hell hasn’t, and apparently Kara doesn’t realize yet that living a happy life is impossible if she’s not there. (Part of her is laughing hysterically, because hasn’t she been trailing after Kara trying to pull her out of messes since she was a kid? What’s one more?)

And if this stupid plan doesn’t work and the semi-repaired pod she’s flying explodes spectacularly, well…

Alex can’t picture life without her sister anyway.

Ahead of her, above her, she sees a figure arcing across her vision like a shooting star. She throttles the engine, pod threatening to shake apart around her, but Kara is dying, and Alex is not letting her go without a fight.

——————

Alex twists Kara’s necklace between her fingers as she stands watch over her. Kara’s been wearing it since the day she arrived, and it’s strange to see it not around her neck. 

She looks over her sister under the yellow lamps. Kara is less turtle-like these days, less inclined to hide herself away (although… the sleeping in the sunlight _is_ kind of lizard-like). She’s out there, doing what she thinks she was sent to Earth to do. 

But if Kara is less like the girl she was, then what about her? She’s spent a long time hiding behind curtains, in the shadows people leave behind. Kara. Dad. Mom. J’onn. She’s taught herself that it’s better in those long shadows than standing front-and-center, because she’s always trying to measure up and falling short.

It’s the sort of thing she’s learned to live with.

But the other half of that equation, she realizes as the necklace dangles from her hand, is the part that’s orders of magnitude more important. 

_“You’re Supergirl’s hero.”_

She’d scoffed when J’onn told her that. Alex can’t fly, doesn’t have super-strength, isn’t invulnerable. The idea that she can protect them, be anyone’s hero, is ridiculous. There are a million things she can’t do. Alex is just a human. 

And yet… none of that really matters, because she’s never stopped _trying_. She just didn’t realize that when she stands in the sun her own shadow looms just as large.


End file.
